First of all, im ximian fanboy, without a doupt. I've been running evolution since the first public release and i have been using it as my only email client. Also, i have been using Ximian desktop as it first came up till the date redhat 8.0 came out which wasnt supported os at the time. And i loved it too. Same thing about red-carpet. All i can say. YEY! XIMIAN!

And you can belive i was extatic when XD2 was released few days ago. Finally! And for my current distro redhat 9! I was wiser from the previous installation which took ages because of the heavy load on ximians network but so i waited a day to ease it off and i started the installation process few hours ago..

Now, in this point lets review how ximian wants to make money from home users: They are selling red-carpet express access to get "faster downloads and installs". All this sounds good but how does it work in real life ?

Now, each of you who have started the ximian installer knows that in the way to actually installation, user can choose out of many mirrors. I chose Tampere Univercity since its the closest because i live in finland. Also because i *know* it delivers fast since i use it as my red-carpet mirror.

But what the heck, downloading is taking really really long time. I'll go and try to pull of the whole ximian tree from my mirror with ftp, i get around 2-3MB/s which is something i was actually expecting. So what is the problem ? I fire tcpdump and see where the data actually comes in..

Voilã!

The datastream is coming still from red-carpet.ximian.com (aka axon.ximian.com) but why ? I chose my mirror, twice, before the installation download started and in both cases it pointed to Tampere Univercity.

But why? Of i remember. Ximian is selling red-carpet express access for "faster installations and upgrades". Now, Is ximian's business model to cell bandwidth and limit it from voluntery mirror providers like Tampere University (note that there where many other univs in the mirror list) ? I dont think so, not that it wasn't possible politically but i bet it wouldnt be possible technically either..

So, Lets think it a bit more. Slow download, even from "selected mirror" leads to frustration. Advertisement just before installation about faster downloads and install. Why "Different" installation program, why not just use the ximian installer red-carpet ?

1+1=3 or.. is it..

UPDATE:

Just to be fair, i found out after a bit of digging what the problem was. My Redhat 9 wasnt up2date with all current redhat rpms and XD2 installer tried to pull them off ximian mirror (without a warning i might add). But allthou i ran up2date and updated all packages.. This "slow download" problem still was present. I got pass this by downloading xd2 iso image off from BitTorrent.

This whole case seem to get messier day after day. As most of you know allready, sco has now "scosource" website which does 2 following things

Promotes their new product called ScoSOURCE

Acts as propaganda engine in their lawsuit against IBM

Now, last part was kinda what people could expect but the first wasnt. Incredible! Could these two cases be related to one and another? What ScoSource is all about is that now Sco is licensing their libraries for $149 of single cpu and why you may ask ? In the past there was ibcs2 and now, its successor Linux Abi. There are sco compatibility modules that allow linux to run sco unix (and some other formats too) binaries. If and when these binaries are dynamically linked, one would need sco's libraries too and this is what scosource is (at least, thats what assumption). On the pdf file found on scosource website, its stated that ibcs2 was and is open standard so most likely the case against IBM is not about this allthou, there is warnings to linux sysadmins about this issue:

"In addition, SCO has cautioned Linux users who may knowingly or unknowingly have used SCO's shared libraries in enabling Unix applications to run under Linux. "

Ok so what would the case then be ? In Gartner: Warning To Linux IS Shops page on scosource site, there are slight hints where people might want to look for clues. Lets see the following paragraph:

SCO's claim against IBM of theft of intellectual property contributed during Monterey for a high-end Unix OS for Intel is arguable. Sequent (later acquired by IBM) was another member of the Monterey Project that had expertise in high-end Unix capability for scalable Intel servers -- for example, nonuniform memory access (NUMA) scaling. However, Sequent was a licensee of System V source code.

So there might be a change that their claims are true ? Time will tell.. But also there's been some talk that some of the ip code has been in the kernel for years. Could they still use ibcs2 and linux abi some way ? Or is there something other too that we dont know off. I dont know and i dont care. I know one thing for sure. With this lawsuit and Scosource product, they are shooting themselves on the head in the eyes of oss community. And they are after scoring a lot of money since their "head product" after sco/caldera sell-out, tarantella, wasnt that big hit. Gartner warning puts its quite nicely:

If IBM is found to be in violation according to the complaint, its options will be to settle on a compromise in damages or to buy out SCO. It is unlikely IBM will acquire SCO and add to an already complex portfolio with SCO's aging OSs, especially with Linux as IBM's mainstream direction. However, IBM is committed to protect its users and maintain Unix license rights. Thus, IBM would opt for a settlement (0.8 probability if the suit is upheld).

I got email over the last weekend that was a bit funny to me even thou it was about serious matter to that poster. It seems that maintainer of cols faq is posting also a lot of anti-semitistic material to newsgroups and someone had decided to inform people credited in security faq about this. I can imagine that most people would like not to associate with such people but i was more supprised that im credited in the faq ;) W00t for me!

I also did some digging and it seems that my fire-waller was quite well spread few years ago when it was released. I guess i should rewrite it a bit to allow new iptables and/or cisco style acl logs to be reported.

I guess im now a security guru! ;)

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.